


Appendix - General World Building

by PastaBucket



Series: Gensokyo Tea Festival (of Fridge Horror) [5]
Category: Touhou Project
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 17:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18595930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: This is a thorough description of my headcanon Touhou world, especially as it compares to Zun's canonical world, so that readers won't become confused.I would normally have written this in the series description, but I'm running out of character space there.





	Appendix - General World Building

Welcome to Touhou - the Pastabucket Edition - where things are crapsaccharine and horrifying in retrospect, but a little more obvious in their dark tones that Zun's own take on it.

This world will shamelessly deviate from canon when I find it appropriate. I also don't know much about Touhou, or more than 10 of its 180 girls, nor am I Japanese, and so loyal Touhou fans will no doubt be very, very confused by my world.

This world is driven by character interaction - not action.  
The baseline tone is relaxing ASMR, but it will typically deviate into horrifying things one way or another, because it's hard to write about characters doing nothing but chilling.  
Nobody's heard of such a thing as danmaku in this world, and there will be no fighting if I can help it.  
Some readers may find the slow pace boring, and that's why I'm telling you this now, before you waste your time reading.

The **main tension** in this world, is between Reimu and Remilia. Although the two parties are strongly at odds with eachother, neither are interested in getting into a direct confrontation over it. This uneasy peace is maintained by leaving it up to the human village whether they want to side with Reimu or Remilia.

 **The human village** in this world, consists of Touhou fans, and as such, they are surprisingly loyal to Remilia and her allies, tolerating a comedic amount of her exploitation of them since most of them are stupid, desperate lolicon caricatures who just jumps at any chance to get intimate with "their waifus". (I'm not saying that real world lolicons are stupid - that's just how I portray them in my fics.)

...and with the village not wanting anything to be done about Remilia, Reimu just has to put up with things.

 **Reimu** , in this world, is a responsible shrine maiden. She doesn't drink, or host drunken parties, and she doesn't consider the troublesome Youkai to be her friends. Her shrine is still not that popular, though, since the human village (again, consisting of Touhou fans) doesn't find her to be attractive enough, or sexually available. Despite being somewhat of an outcast in this way, she still persists as an oasis of purity, should anyone come to seek it.

The "shintoism" that Reimu practices, is really unconventional - more akin to buddhism than actual shintoism. It focuses on achieving and maintaining purity through inner peace and serenity, which in turn comes from the nurturing of good habits, and constructive ways to handle and ward off impure things like destructive habits. (This includes for example drinking alcohol, fighting, bitterness, and having sex outside of marriage.)

You may ask yourself where "the other protagonist" is. Well, I've tried to find a place for **Marisa** in this world, but to be frank, I just personally find her to be offputting. Even as a villain, I don't want to write about lying thieves - I'm just too disgusted with her existence. ...but she's probably around somewhere, deep in the Forest of Magic, far away from my fics.

The same goes for **Aya Shameimaru** : I see no use for a reporter in my world, and her other canonical defining trait is that she's insultingly rude and dishonest, which just translates into "I'm here to make you feel bad by harassing the story and its characters.". ...so there has never existed any reporters in my feudal Gensokyo, and no cameras have been invented either.

 **Youmu** is here the Youkai of death - the Grim Reaper. This means that Komachi Onozuka doesn't exist, since Youmu already fills her role. As a person, Youmu is indifferent to the world, and as emotionless as a corpse. She's seen people die since the beginning of humanity, and since a lot of deaths has been due to human stupidity, she just dismisses humanity as stupid altogether. Canonically she's afraid of ghost stories, but not in my world.

Rivalling her maturity, is **Sakuya Izayoi** \- a half-human half-Youkai representing the limited span of time, and by extension duty and stress. She respects only people who work, when she's not busy working herself, taking care of the Scarlet Devil Mansion. Every tick of the clock that is wasted by a lazy, day dreaming person, she can manifest as a dagger to send his way.  
Sakuya is an exception to the huge separation between humans and Youkai, the reason being that Remilia needed a maid, whereupon Patchouli summoned the hardest working human from the Outside world, and magically gave her the title of Youkai so that she would gain the powers necessary for taking care of the household chores.

Whether **Patchouli Knowledge** is alive or dead, is a question of debate, since in my fanon world, she fills the role of an undead liche. Her life extension studies has so far extended her conscious existence far beyond what a normal human life would have allowed, especially considering her self-poisoned body.

Patchouli's assistant **Koakuma** is her bat Shikigami ("familiar") that she keeps to fetch her books whenever she needs them (since Patchouli is both too physically weak and preoccupied to do so). I haven't mentioned her in a story, because she's too unimportant.

Many fans would like to portray **Flandre** as this lonely victim in Remilia's cruel control. I think it's very wrong to do that. I see Flandre as a Lovecraftian Great Old One, who is so schizoid and powerful that she has to be locked up for the sake of the world, or she would put it in her mouth like a small child would. Flandre represents the danger inherent in the ignorance of a small child. Locking Flandre up is one of the good functions that Remilia serves - Remilia being the lesser threat. (This doesn't mean that I don't personally like Flandre - I do - but my writing is about conveying experiences important to me, and I've known a little psycho girl just like her, who at one point tried to set me up to put me in prison just for the fun of it.) The only one that could rival Flandre, would be **Clownpiece** , whose lengthier bio can be found in her own separate story. As stated above, instead of Flandre "crushing the eye" of things, she puts them in her mouth. She's able to do that because she doesn't abide by the laws of reality, and tend to break them all around her wherever she goes. This includes things like perspective making objects smaller if they're further away, meaning that she can just pick celestial bodies out of the sky as if they were small berries.

I took great liberties with **Chen**. Chen is kind of like a wild pet at the mansion, not really owned by anybody, but whom still has some semblence of loyalty. In my world Chen is the Youkai of lycanthropes, but because we need to keep things cutesy, instead of a werewolf, she's a cute were-housecat, but caught in a constant mix between states no matter what the moon says. She has the carefreeness of a cat, but also the loyal characteristics of a dog, and so she helps out whenever she feels like it. I know that Touhou canonically has other Youkai, like half-dogs, but I feel like only one animal Youkai is enough of a representation.

The reason that the whole world of Gensokyo can exist in such a relaxed and lighthearted way, actually rests on **Cirno** , and her sucking at her job as the fairy of chills and spooks. The reason for her powers being absent, hasn't been explained, at least yet, but would they work, Gensokyo would be a terrifying place indeed.

Speaking of **fairies** , my world classifies them as lesser Youkai. They are in turn divided into normal fairies (with no significant representation in the world), and Daiyousei ("Greater Fairies"), which can be just as powerful as Youkai. Cirno and Clownpiece are examples of Daiyousei.

Now let's talk **worlds** outside of Gensokyo:

There is no **underworld** in my fanon - no heaven or hell. This means that **Eiki Shiki** doesn't exist. If a Youkai dies, another Youkai will spring into existence in its place, and if its meaning somehow fades into oblivion, so will the Youkai. In this way, think of the Youkai as a spiritual title of representation. If a human dies, he will typically just cease to exist. There is not even a rebirth for a human. (This makes undead being brought back to life in one of my chapters, that much more disturbing, since it just shouldn't happen.) The exception to this is ghosts, which are spirits so distraught in life that they cannot find the peace of death. A subtype of ghosts are hungry ghosts (like **Yuyuko** ), which are just manifested impurity/bad karma resembling a soul, that a diseased soul has left behind.

 **Yuyuko** 's bad karma, isn't really her own, but is a result of her being pressured to take on the impurities of her entire village, while denying her any opportunity to cleanse herself. In this way her village could live however they wanted without concerning themselves with becoming impure as a result - a very cruel tradition.

The moon - that according to Zun canon represents China - has lunarians living on it, but I don't think I'll visit it, since I think it's irrelevant to a Japanese setting. (Characters like Chang'e, Junko, and Hecatia, severely lack meaning outside of historical Chinese context.) However, I'm correcting the canon by making **Hong Meiling** of lunarian ancestry, since she's canonically meant to be Chinese.

 

I'll expand this appendix if I come up with anything more to say about the world.


End file.
